Six Million Songs in Your Pocket: Apple Approves Spotify for iPhone

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Six Million Songs in Your Pocket: Apple Approves Spotify for iPhone

Spotify, the music streaming application which brings any of six million songs instantaneously to your desktop has been approved by Apple for the iPhone. Paying Spotify customers will be able to access all this music, anytime, and your playlists are even cached locally for access offline — useful for both air-travelers and iPod Touch owners. In short, Apple has just approved an application which renders iTunes obsolete.

For the political and behind the scenes details go to Eliot Van Buskirk’s excellent article on our sister blog, Epicenter, in which he describes the worries of the Swedish company that Apple would swat their app flat, and the implications of having six million songs in your pocket.

Back at Gadget Lab, we’re wondering just what this means for the iPhone itself. First, right now we don’t know how much space Spotify can use to store music offline. I’d happily wipe all my music and start over, especially if the iPhone app is using the higher quality 320kbps Ogg Vorbis codec that the desktop version uses.

In fact, I’d happily dump iTunes altogether, if only there was a viable podcast solution (my main audio use of my iPod) which grabbed podcasts and put them into the actual iPod music library. That would be it: apps can be downloaded direct to the device, my contacts and calendars are already synced over the air to Google’s services.

However this shakes out, though, one thing is clear. Spotify can only drive sales of the iPhone. Unless Apple adds its own subscription service to iTunes, what does it care how you get the music onto the device?

The app should be in the iTunes Store any time now, but only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Britain, France and Spain.